Faced with dwindling petroleum supplies and increased reliance on foreign oil, the idea of fueling your car with corn-based ethanol, grown here in the United States, sounds like an ideal solution. The ethanol is distilled from the kernels, and the remaining ""wet mash"" is then shipped to dairies to be fed to cows, in what proponents of the technology believe is a sustainable process.
However, Tad Patzek, professor of geological engineering at the University of California-Berkeley, disagrees with that claim. Patzek, who spoke as a part of a lecture series hosted by the Nelson Insitute called ""What would Aldo Leopold Think About Corn Ethanol?"" argued that rather than saving the earth, biofuels are damaging it even more quickly.
Patzek explained that biofuels, which are mainly fuels made from corn and soy, are highly inefficient. To grow corn requires energy input beyond photosynthesis; the corn must be irrigated, fertilized, shipped to a distilling plant and distilled into ethanol. Patzek believes that the energy required to create ethanol from corn kernels far outweighs the energy gained from corn ethanol—in essence, corn ethanol represents a net loss in energy.
To Patzek, an even bigger problem with using biomass for fuel is the massive amounts of land destroyed to grow the plants. Between 1992 and 1997 alone, 7.2 million acres of land were leveled to grow plants for fuel. Patzek explained that it is not ""morally superior to burn Earth's surface for our wants, instead of our needs.""
Even ignoring the ecological impacts of cutting down trees, the loss of the leaves alone is a huge blow to the ecosystem we live in. In photosynthesis, leaves absorb carbon dioxide and transform it into oxygen for us to breath. Carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that, once in our atmosphere, increases global warming, is released from the soil when the trees are cut down. In fact, the carbon dioxide released in cutting down tropical forests in the Amazon rivals the total carbon dixodie emissions of the United States.
Suddenly, ethanol starts looking more like a damaging pollutant than an answer.
While Patzek did make a brief plug for solar photovoltaic cells, calling them one of the more efficient renewable energies, his real push was for increased efficiency and a decrease in energy consumption. If all the fuss is about reliance on foreign oil, a simple 15 percent increase in fuel efficiency in the U.S. transportation industry alone could eliminate all oil imports from the Middle East.
Patzek also pointed to the food industry as an area which wastes inordinate amounts of energy—the average food item travels about 900 miles before it reaches your plate.
Patzek admitted that his figures are based on averages, and in some scenarios growing corn can be done with much lower energy input. But with the U.S. population projected to gain somewhere from 110 to 160 million people by 2050, we will need a sustainable solution that does not kill the ecosystems we rely on to live.
